Hi, I have just been asked to take photographs at a presentation in about 3 hours time (person dropped out who was due to do it). I am trying to work out the best settings and wonder if anyone can advise me. I'm a little nervous as a lot of trophies are being presented and I need to get it right. I've been looking at YouTube videos and websites but any settings advice would be most welcome. Thank you so much.
what camera, lenses and equipment do you have? do you shoot manual or religh on the auto settings what sort of lighting is there are you allowed to or going to take your own lighting without any of the venue or info i'd have to guess its an indoor event and you don't have your own lighting / speed light? so i'd go with the fastest lens, something like an ƒ1.4 prime, if you have an ƒ2.8 zoom that can go too, alot depends on the lighting and indoor / outdoor you might want a wide lens like an 11-22mm for any group shots and if its a big event that might be necessary if you lucky and its outdoors then a wide to medium reach zoom should have plenty of light so an 18-150mm, again i have no idea what lenses you have setting wise, out door easy iso limited to 400, if its good sunny day then lock it off at 100, if you have any say in the positioning which i'm guessing you wont then try not to shoot into the sun, if you do an nd filter and speed light might be nessecery to both kill the glare from the sun and to put light onto your subjects, so try and get a good position to avoid this shutter speed over 1/250 if you not using flash or you'll have to run the flash sync speed, faster if you have the sun behind you and got plenty of light aperture wise ƒ8 would be good for getting people in focus if you don't care about the background, ƒ2.8 or lower if you want to blur out some background and seperate the subject, you'll need to get closer to the subject or the background may still be in the range of the depth of field, if you have a say get the subject to move away from any backgrounds unless the place and any logos are to be included for reference in the images so back to ƒ8 indoors with no added light then you may want to be at your fastest aperture so wide open depending on lens, (lowest ƒstop,number) shutter speed my need to be dropped a bit to around 1/200 to be close to reducing camera shake on an stabilized lens like a fast prime and to reduce you own hand shake, this does depend on your skills and the motion of the people and weither you are using a tripod, if people are stopping for a pose to camera this will help indoors with no light will have a big effect on your iso vs grain and what type of camera you have, newer RF bodies are really good in lowlight, older ones depending can be ok to poor hence the need for a faster lens knowing your camera and what iso you can get away with etc is something to know and learn, being able to shoot in manual mode also helps as most auto modes i've seen like to ramp up the iso to quite high levels in low light and sometimes that can be needed if you do need to use a high iso make sure you frame the image for the final image size, if you have to crop or zoom into the image after the event it will magnify the grain from high iso images something i like to do take images of the empty scene, ie without any people in it, if you get there early you can ask to move stuff while you get some 'data shots' the reason i like to do this is for the inevitable "oh can you remove this person or thing " from an image, you can then use the data images to replace background over the item / person to be removed if it comes up if there are and shiny posters or bulletin boards in the shot see if you can move or reangle them before the session so you don't have unnecessary highlights i mostly do wildlife so there might be stuff i missed out, probably you already been and done the gig but hey if someone else is reading in the future it might be useful, also how did you do, any images to share?
Thank you so much for your long reply. This is really useful and I will take this on board for future. I am used to doing close up things with my maco lens so taking photographs at a presentation was something I hadn't done before. I must admit I did keep changing my settings during the event as there were gaps in the various presentations. I have a Canon EOS 2000D and, for most of the photographs, I used Scene Intelligent Auto with a high ISO setting. Most of the photographs came out successfully with a few which I wasn't happy with but I did make sure I took a few of each recipient so at least I got everyone. I think I can learn a lot from your reply and my photographs from last night. I'm sure I'll do a better job if I happen to be asked again. Many thanks for your advice.
